Supreme Court Draws the Line on NAB Appeals and Bail

On 24 July 2026, a three member bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Justice Musarrat Hilali and Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan resolved a constitutional question that had been quietly building since the creation of the Federal Constitutional Court under the twenty seventh constitutional amendment.

The question was narrow on its face but consequential in practice: once an appeal in a NAB case moves to the jurisdiction of the FCC, can the Supreme Court still entertain a bail application arising from that same case?

The dispute had its roots in the addition of Section 32 A to the National Accountability Ordinance on 5 March 2026. That provision allows a convicted person aggrieved by a High Court decision, or the Prosecutor General Accountability acting on the Chairman NAB’s instructions, to file a second appeal before the FCC within thirty days.

What the provision did not say, at least not explicitly, was what should happen to a bail plea tied to the same case once the main appeal had already been routed to the new court.

Counsel for the accused, Amir Mahmood, argued that bail for an under trial prisoner is governed separately under Section 497 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and that Section 32 A speaks only to second appeals by convicted persons, with no mention of bail whatsoever.

On the other side, the Attorney General and NAB took the position that a case and the incidental proceedings flowing from it, including bail, cannot be split across two different superior courts. One trunk, they argued, cannot have two heads.

The Supreme Court, in a thirty page judgment, sided with the latter view. Reading Article 175F(1)(a), Article 175F(2) and Sections 32 and 32 A of the NAB Ordinance together, the bench held that the forum for second appeals in NAB cases, along with any connected pending proceedings falling within the FCC’s ambit, is the Federal Constitutional Court.

Bail, the court reasoned, is not a freestanding proceeding severed from the main case. It is an ancillary or incidental matter that arises out of it. Keeping the principal appeal in the FCC while the bail plea from the same case remained with the Supreme Court would invite parallel proceedings, legal ambiguity and the real risk of conflicting orders.

The most important principle to emerge from the ruling is a simple but often forgotten one: jurisdiction is not something a court can claim by preference, nor something litigants can assign by consent, past practice or public pressure.

The bench was careful to frame its decision as neither a retreat nor a defeat for any institution, but as a straightforward division of judicial authority as laid down by the Constitution.

It also made clear that NAB’s failure to object to a similar arrangement in some earlier case could not, by itself, hand the Supreme Court a jurisdiction the current constitutional and legal framework no longer gives it. Precedent born of silence does not override the text of the law.

There is also a quieter but meaningful point buried in the judgment. The court noted that the earlier discretionary route of seeking leave to appeal has now been replaced by a proper statutory right of second appeal before the FCC. In other words, the accused has not lost a remedy. The remedy has simply moved to a new address.

It would be a mistake, and a fairly lazy one, to read this judgment as a power struggle between the Supreme Court and the Federal Constitutional Court, or to attach it to any single political figure’s case.

Doing so drains a legal question of its substance and replaces it with spectacle. The ruling is not confined to one accused, one party, or one case. It lays down a rule that applies equally to NAB, to prosecutors and to every accused person who comes after.

If the law has made the FCC the final appellate forum for NAB matters, then no party gets to pick the Supreme Court simply because it is more convenient, more familiar or thought to be more favourable. The forum is decided by law, not by the identity of the litigant standing before it.

The larger lesson here is one about judicial character. A strong judiciary is not one that clings to every matter that comes its way. It is one that respects both the extent and the limits of its own authority. Judicial independence means standing firm against media narratives, political pressure, and popular sentiment, and doing so by staying anchored to the Constitution.

In this judgment, the Supreme Court neither grabbed power nor surrendered it. It simply affirmed a principle worth holding onto: one case should travel through one coherent legal forum, forum shopping has no place in the system, and every court should exercise only the authority the Constitution and the law have actually given it.